


i need you to see me when i'm see through

by itsafuckingdeathwish



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy
Genre: Angst, Car Accidents, Character Turned Into a Ghost, Death, Heavy Angst, Like, M/M, Peterick, Supernatural Elements, like this whole thing is just angsty as hell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-15
Updated: 2019-01-15
Packaged: 2019-10-10 20:53:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17433353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itsafuckingdeathwish/pseuds/itsafuckingdeathwish
Summary: He didn’t remember dying itself, the paramedics who had surely come, any of it, except for little flashes, voices in the dark, scenes like a movie screen way off in the distance.He did remember waking up to the sunlight pouring through the big picture windows of the bedroom and pooling like honey in the folds of the white sheets that he called boring and Patrick called classic, head fuzzy and sugar sticky.He glanced at Patrick, limbs all tangled, but something was wrong. It was the angle; Pete should have been lying in bed right next to Patrick, but he wasn’t. He was looking down on it all, like he was detached from his body except that was wrong too because his body wasn’t there on the bed with Patrick; it wasn’t anywhere. Patrick was all alone and Pete was too. He felt cold and miles away, even though the bed couldn’t have been more than five feet away from him.





	i need you to see me when i'm see through

**Author's Note:**

> tw for brief refs to suicidal thoughts

Pete didn’t remember much about that night. The flashes in the night like the Christmas lights that were always hanging in Patrick’s room tangled with the neurons inside his head. The weary brakes shrieked like feedback as they gave up, ringing in his ears. Copper bright blood dripped out of his body instead of the sharp burst of a needle sliding into his skin, but the heady rush felt just the same, just as disorienting.

  
He remembered sitting crumpled against the steering wheel of his crumpled car, watching the car headlights on the highway streaking by, streaking past him. All filled with people heading toward something, moving forward in their lives, all with something to look forward to.

  
He’d thought about that a lot recently, the two thoughts chasing each other around behind his forehead perfectly captured inside the metaphor that was the cars on the highway flying bright as stars past him, dying alone in the driver’s seat, crushed against a tree in the dark.

  
The first thought was a bit similar to parallel worlds. Every single person around him was the sun for their own little universe, all of them coexisting next to each other, planets orbiting around them but never colliding with anybody else’s. Everyone had their own life, but for most of them, Pete would never know them as more than a stranger in a coffeeshop, someone he passed on a sunny sidewalk, a body inside a car flicker-flashing past him in the dark on Route 12.

  
If everybody else was a sun, Pete figured he must be a black hole, a collapsing star.

  
The second thought was that if everybody has their own world, none of them would be affected at all by Pete dying alone in his car, that every planet would keep spinning, every star would keep shining. Even the ones who knew him best (meaning even Patrick), maybe they’d wobble for a bit, but they would be okay.

  
It probably wasn’t true, even Pete knew that, somewhere inside, but he couldn’t help but think it, needed to think it, because of the third thought that had joined the first two since he’d crashed into this tree.

  
The third thought was the hardest. The third thought was that he’d been thinking about slipping away in his car for a few months now, but it was supposed to be little blue pills on his tongue dragging him into the dark in an empty parking lot somewhere, not a punctured lung or internal bleeding or whatever the hell was wrong with him now.

  
For a while – he didn’t know how long – he let his thoughts twist and tangle inside his head until they were bleeding into each other and he couldn’t tell one thought from the next. He could feel his mind slipping away, feel his eyelids sliding shut, feel the butterfly inside his wrist beating its wings slower and slower and weaker and weaker and softer and softer. He didn’t try to stop it.

  
He didn’t remember dying itself, the paramedics who had surely come, any of it, except for little flashes, voices in the dark, scenes like a movie screen way off in the distance.

  
He did remember waking up to the sunlight pouring through the big picture windows of the bedroom and pooling like honey in the folds of the white sheets that he called boring and Patrick called classic, head fuzzy and sugar sticky.

  
He glanced at Patrick, limbs all tangled, but something was wrong. It was the angle; Pete should have been lying in bed right next to Patrick, but he wasn’t. He was looking down on it all, like he was detached from his body except that was wrong too because his body wasn’t there on the bed with Patrick; it wasn’t anywhere. Patrick was all alone and Pete was too. He felt cold and miles away, even though the bed couldn’t have been more than five feet away from him.

  
He hated this, he wanted to be dead or alive, not this hell or purgatory or whatever the fuck this was. He didn’t want Patrick right there in front of him, so fucking close but never close enough.

  
Pete stayed like that for two years, looking down on the life that he should have been living with Patrick from above, never part of it. In the beginning, he’d tried screaming, but no sounds ever came out. When he tried to touch things, his hand dissolved into smoke and passed right through. Even when he was standing right in front of him, Patrick never looked at Pete, only through him.

  
That was the worst part of all.

  
He didn’t notice at first, but the world looked different now. Like when you’re standing in a roomful of strangers connected only by the same four walls and the same beat thrumming straight out of the speakers into your pounding hearts. When it’s too dark to see the glitter sweat and fucked out, blissed out faces, eyes blown, because the only lighting is neon stage lights pooling in collarbones and in the space above cupid’s bows. The whole world looked like that, the way that the neon light made everything in the room a double image, dream bright purple or blue hovering next to hands, the way that makes you wonder if someone roofied your drink or if you’re just high on the beat and living. Reality had another color superimposed on it, making it all look fake, like an acid trip illusion.

  
He used to hope maybe this was all just a coma fueled dreamscape, that one day he’d wake up and look at Patrick from a hospital bed, instead of looking at Patrick, alone, from above the bed they used to share.

  
He gave up on that, along with a lot of other things, a long time ago.

  
When he was alive, he’d always read of ghosts (because at this point, that was all he could possibly be) haunting places, but he wasn’t tied to their apartment building. He was forced to drift along with Patrick everywhere he went (which didn’t seem to be very far anymore), watching Patrick live life without him, which was so much worse.

  
He guessed by now that planets still spinning, stars still shining theory had been disproved, because Patrick’s universe looked to Pete like it had been decaying in a molasses slow entropy ever since that night, and having to watch that happen to the man he loved hurt worse than slamming into a tree at sixty miles per hour.

  
One day, too many tears and screams and sleepless nights later for Pete to count anymore, he watched Patrick drive down the street with glassier eyes than usual, like he was a breath away from letting tears spill down his cheeks and flood his car. He’d seen Patrick drive the same streets to work every single day, but today he made a wrong turn, then another, heading farther and farther away, until Pete finally realized where they were going, what day it was.

  
Patrick was heading straight for the cemetery where Pete’s body was buried six feet under a cold gravestone, two years after Pete’s death – exactly two years after Pete’s death.

  
Pete was always cold now, but in that moment he felt even colder than usual.

  
Patrick finally parked, but didn’t get out of the car; he just sat there numbly, staring off into thin air.

  
(God, oh god Pete wished Patrick would stare at him, look at him, see him, just glance at him, even just for a minute. But Patrick never had, and never would.)

  
In life, Pete had always hated seeing pictures of himself, videos, hearing his own voice out of speakers, because it felt like someone screaming at him that yes, you exist, you are real, and that just seemed so strange, the idea that he really existed for somebody outside of the fever dream that must have been his life, but now he wished more than anything that he could exist for Patrick, that when he screamed himself hoarse the sound would reach Patrick, that Patrick could see him outside of old photographs.

  
After long minutes, stretching out like taffy but nowhere near as sweet, Patrick climbed out of the car and climbed the grassy hill to Pete’s grave. It must have been at least six months since Patrick had come here, deciding it was just reminding him too much of what he’d lost, but he still clearly knew the way exactly, barely had to think at all.

  
The clouds were hanging heavy, raindrops dripping from them like diamonds. Patrick hadn’t brought an umbrella, but he didn’t seem to even notice the rain.

 

Pete couldn’t feel it at all.

  
Once they got to the sad, cold little gravestone, reducing Pete’s whole life to a two-foot-high block of limestone, the tears poured out of Patrick’s eyes the second he stood in front of it, like a dam finally breaking.

  
It had been two years, and Patrick hadn’t moved on at all. He still didn’t talk to people, hadn’t even tried to go out with anyone, still cried and screamed, and Pete hated watching it all.

  
He was okay with himself dying, but he couldn’t stand to watch Patrick stop living.

  
Pete couldn’t remember being happy since he’d died, but he also couldn’t remember ever being sadder than this moment right now, watching the love of his life cry in front of the stone and dirt and bones that were his only remains. He just wished that Patrick could see him, just for an instant, to know that he was still here, but he knew by now, after two years, that he would never exist for Patrick ever again.

  
Transparent never seemed all that bad until it became all he was.

  
Pete turned away from Patrick and the sad little gravestone, unable to take looking at them anymore. It was somehow so much easier to look at a hundred cold stones and colder bodies than it was to look at this one.

  
It was one of those days where there were so many clouds in the sky that you couldn’t see any at all, where the air was so saturated with loss that the entire world was dripping with gray---

  
When Pete heard Patrick’s sharp gasp, he couldn’t help but turn back around, only to find him staring right at Pete.

  
He’d never really grasped the importance of prepositions until he saw the worlds of difference between at and through. No one had looked at him, seeing him and not the grass or wall or sky behind him, in two years.

  
Patrick’s eyes were wide, his mouth hanging open just a bit.

  
“No,” he murmured. “No. No, no, no, nononononono.” The words spilled into each other until it was nothing more than a meaningless chant, like a prayer to keep the bad things away.

  
“You’re not real. You can’t be. You’re dead, you’re gone and you’re never coming back. You died two years ago. You---”

  
The world swayed around Pete like when he got dizzy after forgetting to eat for too long, every color bleeding into each other until the trees and grass and gray gray sky and cold gravestones all rushed away. Patrick was the only thing left and he filled up all of Pete’s vision, all that he could see in every direction.

  
And then Patrick fell away too, and everything was gone.

  
Pete too.

**Author's Note:**

> soooooo i wrote most of this months ago and then was very unproductive and didn't touch it for forever but it's done now? kudos make me happy comments make me very very happy pls do it  
> hope u liked it! go check out my other stuff if u did!  
> ps sorry i've been literally gone for months mental health has been kinda kicking my ass rn so i've been super unmotivated but i'm trying?


End file.
